Pride and prejudice - part one

He went from a family joke to the greatest writer in the English language ... and, to many of his peers, a thoroughly nasty piece of work. But is Nobel laureate VS Naipaul finally ready to make peace with the world? Robert McCrum meets the Trinidadian exile on his home turf

When, in October 2001, the telephone rang in VS Naipaul's remote Wiltshire home, it was his wife who picked up, as usual. The writer himself never answers. Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish Academy, was on the line with some long-awaited information. The Nobel prize committee had awarded its literature prize to 'Mr Naipaul'. Could he, please, communicate this honour to the great writer? But no, the 98th Nobel literature laureate could not come to the phone. He was busy, writing, and did not wish to be disturbed.

Everyone agrees that VS Naipaul is fully alive to his own importance. A mirror to his work, his life is emblematic of an extraordinary half century, the postwar years. Let it not be said that he does not know this. 'My story is a kind of cultural history,' he remarks, in part of an overture to a long conversation. Nevertheless, he will not be reading Patrick French's forthcoming authorised biography, The World Is What it Is. 'I asked Patrick to do it, but I haven't read a word,' he emphasises, brushing past rumours of discord over the manuscript. 'I don't intend to read the book.'

This volatile mixture of pride and insecurity illuminates everything about him. 'I am the kind of writer,' he once said, 'that people think other people are reading.' That's a characteristic Naipaul formulation, ironically self-deprecating (my audience is small, but select) while at the same time breathtakingly self-confident (I am a great writer whose work deserves to be generally admired).

The light cast by this strange combustion of arrogance and modesty has often exposed the world in new and unexpected ways. At its best, Naipaul's prose is as sharp and lucid as splinters of glass. But there's a paradox here. The man himself is anything but straightforward - an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, inside a mystery: possibly, he is a bit of a puzzle even to himself.

Here, the best explanations lie in his writing. 'I am,' he says, 'the sum of my books,' adding, 'the self that writes the books is the most secret and the deepest.' What, then, does Naipaul's work tell us? The great themes of his prose are loss, identity, corruption, estrangement, oppression, and varieties of exile. So it's appropriate that to begin to find him, we must start with a journey.

Naipaul's directions to his home on the edge of Salisbury Plain are precise and simple. 'Leave London by Cromwell Road. (As though you are going to Heathrow.) But at the Hammersmith Flyover (near Fuller's Brewery) take the left fork to the southwest. You will find yourself on the A316.' The author of Guerrillas is a writer who can give even the stage directions of everyday life a kind of edgy exactitude. He is known to be a stickler, and rather elusive, but I hope to be meeting him in a rare moment of approachability. As well as the imminent biography, Naipaul has been collaborating on a BBC documentary for Arena, and seems to have reached a stage where setting the record straight has become an important project.

Sir Vidiadhar Naipaul - he was knighted for services to literature in 1990 - can sometimes seem locked away in a self-inflicted prison of controversy, misquotation and ill-feeling. Even the most cursory trawl through his cuttings throws up 'prickly', 'contradictory', 'irascible' and 'resentful'. His former editor, Diana Athill, says rather brutally: 'I simply could not allow myself not to like him.' Paul Theroux, another former friend, wrote an entire book, Sir Vidia's Shadow, painfully anatomising the secrets of their friendship in a monumental gesture of literary pique. And that's before you get to Naipaul's incendiary politics.

After a lifetime spent at the crossroads of east and west, Naipaul remains an intensely polarising figure. His study of Islam and the muslim world, Among the Believers, and its important sequel, Beyond Belief, still arouse visceral hostility. The late Edward Said accused him of 'an intellectual catastrophe', promoting 'colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies'. To the poet and fellow Caribbean Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, he is 'VS Nightfall'. Walcott has noted: 'If Naipaul's attitude toward negroes, with its nasty little sneers... was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness?' It must be to his credit as a writer that Naipaul is a man about whom no one is neutral.

Later generations of Caribbean writers have wrestled with his legacy. Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, sees Naipaul as 'a warning and a lure. How can you not be repulsed by the nonsense that has spewed out of his mouth, and yet stunned by the power of his prose?' Caryl Phillips, whose debut novel The Final Passage nods to Naipaul, and who adapted Naipaul's own first novel The Mystic Masseur for the screen, says, 'I admire Naipaul's vision. I don't always agree with his bolder political pronouncements about people and their culture, but that never fully undermined my respect for him as a man dedicated to his craft.'

Today, the traffic on the A316 is evocative of the difficulty in making the approach to Sir Vidia: there are no clear avenues; progress is faltering. As we grind towards the southwest, I mentally review his dossier. The Observer has always been a supporter. As long ago as 1961, Colin MacInnes published a review of A House for Mr Biswas in this newspaper, hailing a 'Caribbean masterpiece, a book truthful in realism yet enriched by deeper resonances relevant to mankind'. When Naipaul won the Nobel prize for Literature in 2001, the paper saluted him as 'the finest contemporary writer of English prose fiction'. Like everyone else, we come to see him with plenty of baggage.

After about 30 miles of stop-start driving the road to the west opens up, through the pines of Berkshire, and begins to make fast running across the flinty downs of Wiltshire, a county that lies at the heart of the English imagination. Naipaul himself has described his own first appearance here: 'I was still in a kind of limbo,' he writes in The Enigma of Arrival. But now his directions are rooted in the landscape: 'Leave A303 at Amesbury. Pick your way through the very small town. After four miles ... you drive a few hundred yards through a small village, with the Avon on your right.'

This is not Shakespeare's river, but a flooding, West Country trout stream. In fact, I am early for our meeting and pull over by a low brick bridge. A light-bulb sun breaks through the mist hanging over the water meadows in front of a lovely Tudor country house and, for a moment, The Wind in the Willows comes involuntarily to mind. Scarcely has the thought popped up when a water rat scurries down the bank and flops into the icy water flowing smoothly under the pontoons.

The silent river and pale sun endorse the moment of reflection. Then I am on my way again. There's a red postbox in a hedge, a crumbling dirt lane and the solitary stone house where Naipaul lives with his second wife, Nadira. Here, you go through a five-barred gate, down a sloping gravel driveway, past a modest saloon car and arrive outside the kitchen. The only sign this might be the home of an internationally renowned writer are some weathered instructions to DHL couriers. But then Lady Naipaul, tall and brightly dressed, is throwing the back door open in her naturally warm, effusive greeting, and it's journey's end.

For years, Naipaul was married to his first wife Patricia Hale in a passionless relationship that seems to have brought out the worst in him. Diana Athill recalls Pat telling her, 'Vidia doesn't like me to come to parties because I'm such a bore.' On her death in 1996, from cancer, Naipaul astounded his friends by turning his back on his long-standing mistress, an Anglo-Argentinian named Margaret Murray, and marrying Nadira Khannum Alvi, a Pakistani journalist with family connections to the government (her brother is a general). It is said that when this vivacious divorcee first saw her future husband at a party she came up and kissed him on the lips, the beginning of an impetuous romance. For his part Naipaul seems happy to be swept along in the whirlwind of her love, and has adopted her daughter by a previous marriage as his own.

Today, Sir Vidia looks comfortable and slightly sleepy in brown corduroy trousers and tweed jacket. My first thought as I was shown into his cosy but elegant sitting-room was that I was having an audience with Mole.

In advance of our conversation, I had imagined some awkwardness, difficulty, scorn, or irritation, even anger. But he is not like that. He does not make speeches. He has a very clear, detached view of the world, and he is a world-class listener. Much of the transcript of the interview is Naipaul's repeated agreement to a question - 'Yes, yes, yes' - accompanied by a silent and vigorous nodding of the head, punctuated by the occasional, rather deft, question of his own. The real surprise, though of course it's there in the books, if not the legend, is his humour. He is a man who says he is greatly amused by the human condition. Already, my recollection of our meeting is influenced by his smiling chuckle.

Naipaul in person is soft-spoken, courteous and attentive. His eyes twinkle merrily when entertained, becoming almost lost in his features, which have a boyish smoothness beneath the grey whiskers. Here in old Wessex, he could easily pass for a guru; in this refuge, beside the Avon, there is serenity and a sense of contentment. In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul once wrote of his 'nervousness in a new place', and of how 'I still felt myself to be in another man's country, felt my strangeness, my solitude.' Now, aged 75, after a lifetime of wandering, he seems to have found a home, domestic, sensual, and happily secluded.

Naipaul says he has been in poor health for the past two years, and is only now recovering. Something in his manner makes you suspect he was always an instinctive valetudinarian. The elderly man who is settling himself rather fussily into a hardback chair in front of me is capable of many moods and disguises. There is the author of some 30 books. There is the provocateur. There is the literary grandee who can deliver the witty and brilliant re-buke. Addressing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, it was Naipaul who came up with the verdict that it was 'an extreme kind of literary criticism'. And, of course, there is the lifelong exile, for whom 'limbo' is a leitmotif.

On both sides of his family, the Naipauls were 'only about 40 or 50 years out of India'. In the merciless flux of empire they had been sent first to East Africa and then to Trinidad to make 'an immigrant Asian community in a small plantation island in the New World'. He has described this as being 'unlikely and exotic, and also a little fraudulent'.

'Fraudulent?' I enquire.

He leans forward thoughtfully: 'Well, it really means that you're not really Indian. You know, Indians don't accept that people who've grown up abroad are Indians. Now they accept the Green Card folk from the United States - that's something to cling on to - but they don't accept the other people like myself.'

I remind him that Salim, the hero of A Bend in The River, describes himself as 'a man without a side', and suggest some self-identification there.

'Yes, yes, it is true, it is true.' He repeats the phrase as if he'd just written it, '"A man without a side." It is true.'

He was born in Trinidad in 1932, but Port of Spain and the Caribbean would never become home: the fastidious and ambitious young man found his extended Indian family unbearable. 'I had to get away,' he says. So he arrived in England a triple exile: from India, from Trinidad, and from his flesh and blood. 'It was a pretty awful childhood,' he remembers. 'The Trinidad side was nice, but the family I was born into ... terrible, terrible. It was very large, with too many people. There was no beauty. It was full of malice. No thought, no beauty. These are things that mattered a lot to me, even when I was young.'

Then there was the unresolved business of his literary ambition. Naipaul has never made any secret of the fact that, from the age of 11, 'the wish came to me to be a writer', a wish that was soon 'a settled ambition', even if, as he now says, it was also 'a kind of sham'. In books and writing, he could master the chaos of his inheritance, soothe the raucous interruptions of the familial past - and find an identity.

But here was another obstacle in the writer's path to himself. 'I wished to be a writer,' he remarks in one of his essays. 'But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own.' Naipaul somehow had to find his voice in English, and to find it in an idiom that did not mimic the imperial masters or compromise his authenticity. Summarising his 50-year search for literary truth, he has expressed it as 'disorder within, disorder without'.

The English books of his school, the best years of his childhood, he says, offered the powerful fantasy of a remote and mysterious world, Dickens's London or Wordsworth's Lakeland, for example. But to a thoughtful and sensitive young man, for whom literature was a salvation, English both worked and did not work. 'I couldn't understand the settings,' he says. Dickens's 'rain' was never a tropical downpour, his 'snow' was unimaginable, and how could Naipaul relate to daffodils he had never seen?

For the 'fraudulent' Indian, uniquely sensitive to his place in the world, the jux-taposition of a full-blown imperial English culture with the 'formless, unmade society' of a small Caribbean island was only a source of panic and uncertainty, especially if it was your deepest ambition to use this language to write about, and make sense of, the world in which you were growing up. 'I might adapt Dickens to Trinidad,' Naipaul has written, 'but it seemed impossible that the life I knew in Trinidad could be turned into a book.'

Enter Naipaul's father. Seepersad Naipaul was a shadowy figure in his eldest son's childhood. 'The man himself remained vague,' is how Naipaul puts it. But his story is as terrible and vivid as anything found in the pages of English literature. A Trinidadian Indian, Seepersad was 26 when Naipaul was born, and had recently become the local correspondent of the Trinidad Guardian in Chaguanas, the heart of the sugar industry. Seepersad was so bursting with literary ambition that he wrote under many names - as Naipaul (or Naipal) and also as Paul Nye and even Paul Prye. His son remembers he took him to see the Ramlila, a pageant-play based on the Ramayana, and also 'read everything' aloud - Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, HG Wells, Gulliver's Travels, high and low culture, snippets and stories from newspapers and magazines. 'It was little pieces, but enough,' he remembers. 'Without it, I would have been a dead man.'

But there was one story Naipaul senior could not tell his son. As a Trinidad Guardian reporter, Seepersad, who had a horror of Indian cult magic, possibly linked to a conflict with his wife's primitive beliefs, had written a number of articles exposing the use of Kali cult practices to fight diseases in cattle. His reports had aroused intense local hostility and finally death threats from the devotees of the goddess Kali, who now declared that unless Seepersad made a conciliatory gesture, he would become poisoned and die. In June 1933, when little Vidia was barely a year old, his father was forced publicly to sacrifice a goat to atone for his journalism. It was a terrible humiliation. His career was ruined, he had a breakdown, lost his way in the world and died of a heart attack in 1953, before his son had published a word. When Naipaul later asked his mother about his father's insanity, she replied, 'He looked in the mirror one day and couldn't see himself. And he began to scream.'

Today, Naipaul venerates his father's memory and recognises that his reporting, the plantation violence, the tribal magic, the incessant storytelling must have seeded Naipaul's own ambitions. Naipaul cannot be drawn on this, however, because to him the craft of writing must be shrouded in mystery.